


Undiscussed

by quicksparrows



Series: Side by Side – Chrobin [18]
Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 10:05:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9603236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicksparrows/pseuds/quicksparrows
Summary: A retelling of Of Sacred Blood; Chrom, Frederick and Ada argue over Validar's intentions and the mysterious doppelgänger. I wrote this in like... summer 2015. Ha ha...... ha.......





	

.

 

"We must discuss an important matter, milord," Frederick says, plainly. His expression is as plain as his tone, save for his eyes: there's something there that makes a shiver go down Ada's spine, even though Frederick has his eyes firmly set on Chrom.

Chrom gets up, somewhat reluctantly. He looks at Ada, and for a second they just share a mutual look of apprehension. In this moment, she wants to throw herself off of a cliff. Even after their tense meeting with Validar and his mysterious hierophant in Plegia, here is Frederick to complicate things.

"Now," Frederick says, curtly.

Chrom moves in front of her, utterly ready for it. Ada rises from her chair, too.

"No," Chrom says. "Frederick, I don't want to hear it."

"Chrom," Ada says. "Don't."

Frederick doesn't look even remotely surprised by his lord's reaction, but Ada can see the tension in his jaw and the hard, defensive line of his shoulders. When their eyes meet over Chrom's shoulder, Ada feels their hard-won years of trust crumble like sandcastles in the wind.

"This cannot go undiscussed, milord," Frederick says. "You know this as well as Ada does."

Chrom looks at her over his shoulder, perhaps having expected her to rebuff Frederick as well, but he finds himself betrayed.

"He's right," Ada says.  The words are bitter in her mouth. In that moment, she feels like a trapped animal, and for the first time, she feels Chrom may be wrong about her. Utterly, devastatingly wrong. 

"This is wrong," Chrom says. "You have no memory of being anything other than who you are now. We can't just act as though that doesn't matter."

"Her memories are not up for debate," Frederick says, almost ignoring Ada herself. "Validar is planning something and Ada is an undeniable element of that plan."

Chrom turns to Frederick, his own jaw setting and his chin lifting. God, Ada wants to love his dedication, but she has never felt like such a wolf in sheep's clothing.

"You know what? Just say it, Frederick," Chrom says. "Just get it over with, say 'I told you so' and walk away."

"I will do no such thing. It is my duty to act as your counsel and, when necessary, be the lone voice of reason," Frederick replies. "We have just discovered your bride -- and the tactician directing our army -- is quite likely an agent of Validar, whether she recalls it or not." 

"Because she has a _twin_?" Chrom demands. "It's a _twin_ , Frederick, who says they weren't separated at birth?"

Chrom is dissolving into frustrated anger again, and Ada just feels cut out of her own discussion. She steps ahead of her husband and faces down Frederick out of sheer necessity.

"Frederick," Ada interjects, "I don't know what is happening. I can't give you any answers, but you have to know that even if everything we found out is true, I don't want any of it. Do you really think I have any memory of this?"

She's close enough that they are nearly chest-to-chest, her hands curled into fists at her sides, her stance wide for a fight, if needed. Frederick stares down at her, his hands clasped behind his back, and he looks at her as though he's never seen her face before in his life.

In some way, Ada had felt a brotherhood with Frederick. He is an admirable man with commitment like none else, and his knowledge and skill surpasses any other in the army. But it is difficult, even after years, to withstand his ongoing honesty. How many times has she been sat down, sometimes alone and sometimes with Chrom, to discuss the lurking danger of her own self? How many times had she seen Chrom and Frederick argue — shouting until Frederick bowed to his lord's insistence, only to repeat the process again in some months? How many times had she listened to Frederick get snide with her, implying she is an hourglass that will inevitably run out? 

She thought they had been set. She'd thought that a few years of quiet peace in a castle and a wedding and a baby would have set Frederick's quarrels with her in the past. She was wrong.

... But oh gods, in the end, he's right, too, isn't he? He's right. She is potentially one of the Grimleal in her own right, and she carries the brand of Grima. What if she were also a Hierophant, a priestess of Grima, someone with power? Is this a clue of her origin? If so, then he was right all along.

"No," Frederick says, finally. "I would be amiss to ignore your shrewdness and aptitude for politics and warfare despite not a single dignitary or soldier in the whole halidom having encountered you, but no. I have no justification in believing you have knowingly deceived us."

Chrom bristles again.

"She is—"

"—still capable of unknowingly deceiving you," Ada cuts in. Chrom looks at her with such anger that she imagines stabbing him in the back would have done less harm. Ada steels herself. "Is that right?"

"Yes," Frederick says. "Validar offers us his fleet at tremendous cost, even when his own nation is in disrepair. The nation is a cesspool of religious fervor, open worship of Grima... and your doppelgänger is the high priestess of the Grimleal. Do you not think it _convenient_ that he not only offers us these kindnesses but FLAUNTS them?"

"Obviously I'm related to her in some way," Ada says. "There's not a chance we aren't. There's no other explanation for her looking like me."

"We didn't see her that close," Chrom says, and Ada's heart sinks. Chrom's convictions are mighty, but they are no less subject to biases, and this is a considerable topic to hedge his bets on. He keeps talking when neither Ada nor Frederick will: "It was dark, and she wore a hood, and we didn't get close."

"No, Chrom," Frederick says. "It was too uncanny. Her appearance, her voice –– everything."

"So?" Chrom says. "Validar is a sorcerer. Who is to say that woman was even a twin? Who is to say he didn't use some dark magic to make that woman _look_ like Ada? She didn't stand the same, she didn't talk the same."

"He'd have to remember what she looked like," Frederick says. "She even wore her hair the same."

"Validar did point out that Ada is well-known," Chrom insists. 

"So we're to trust Validar's point?" Ada interjects. "Chrom, you thought it was me. You genuinely saw me, I saw it on your face."

"No!" Chrom snaps, frustrated. He rounds on her, suddenly, shoulders up and lip curled. "For the gods' sakes, Ada, it's like you want him to be right!"

"Excuse me?" Ada says. "I don't want this."

"Then stop arguing like you do!" he snaps.

He doesn't wait for an answer. He storms out, snapping the tent flap back as he goes, and Ada scowls and moves to follow, but Frederick stops her with a hand around her upper arm. 

"Leave him to cool off," he says.

"He's just going to stew and get angrier," Ada replies.

"He won't," Frederick says, a little terse, a little tired. 

But Chrom goes to bed angry anyway.

 

* * *

 

Hours pass in relative silence. Neither of them sleep well, or consistently, at that. For the most part, it's a lot of ugly silence on each side of the bed, a gulf between them. It drives Ada to frustration.

Chrom doesn't even budge when she peels herself from bed, doesn't say a word when she drags on her coat sleeves and buttons the front with fingers that are trembling in anger. His silence is damning: she's never known his anger before, not directed even marginally at her, and she won't lay here a moment longer in it. She pulls on her boots and tromps out of the tent with her jaw set so tightly she feels it in the roots of her teeth. 

"Where are you going?" Frederick calls from the campfire. Ada glances at him and sees his look of distrust, worsened by the shadows thrown across his face. She waves a hand at him, irritated. She starts to reply, but she doesn't.

Something compels her to keep going, and Frederick doesn't follow, even as she starts to pick her way down the steep incline of the ravine. Good. 

And it's at the bottom of the ravine, just over the last of the steep rocks, when she thinks: _why didn't I just take the road?_

She looks up at the incline, the sheer face of it, and she isn't sure at all, suddenly, why she's down there. She should have walked along the water, she thinks. She should have taken any other reasonably walked route.

 _But you're here now_ , she thinks. _Why not keep going?_

So she heads down the long channel of the ravine. The great stone sides are like a funnel, rising sharply above her and guiding her south. She goes.

 _You're too good for these fools,_ she thinks. But then: _I'm not too good for them. I'm lucky to have them._

And then she pauses, and she thinks: _You? Why not I?_

She looks back over her shoulder. Two or three hundred yards down, she can see the smoke coming up from camp — it's quite far away, and to Ada's recollection, she hasn't walked that far. She had just gotten down the slope. 

 _This is bad,_ she thinks. And: _but you're okay. Keep going._

Ada keeps her feet rooted where she is, and when she does, she gets the distinct impression that she is being watched.

"Hello?" she says, tentatively. 

Nothing.

For a moment, Ada just stands there, cold despite her coat and feeling very much alone. She wraps her arms around herself uncomfortably, deep enough in the ravine that all noise from the night seems to have vanished. Here, there's no noise from camp, no wind in the trees far above, and not a living soul around save the black birds circling so high up that she only sees them when they pass below patches of dim grey clouds. 

She can think in this silence, she decides, even as a feeling of dread creep into her belly like a sickness. She can think about that woman, and what it all means.

It's so quiet.

And then a sensation rips through her skull like an arrow, so powerful that she staggers and thinks, for an instant, that she actually has been shot. It is only when she clutches her head and stumbles to her knees that she realizes, in some panicked back corner of her brain, that she is being attacked by something much worse than a lone archer.

Validar.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Chrom is aware that the bed is empty beside him, but despite the chill and a pang of loneliness, it's almost better than the tension. He's not sure that he's ever felt this kind of tension before, the kind that leaves him fitful and worried. He supposes he had, in some sense, felt a similar tension when Emmeryn was taken, but that was different. This is different. This is no life or death situation, no imperative to choose between sacrifice or execution. 

This is his marriage, and his wife, and the baby at home in a nurse's arms, and the future any of them could have. 

Is it dramatic, Chrom wonders, to fear for his marriage over one serious argument? Neither of them want this, after all.

Chrom looks to her side of the bed, where the covers are still peeled back. He spans a hand across the space. It is still warm, for now. It doesn't make him feel better to think she will likely leave it cold tonight, whether she falls asleep in a chair somewhere or crawls in with a sympathetic friend or something.

Ada has probably gone to sit up in the war room, he reasons, because that is what Ada does: she pours herself into work. She pours herself into it whether she likes it or not, whether it's good for her or not. Ada never sits around and mopes, never curls up and cries when she could write a mile of words in her journal or plot out a hundred theoretical battles. She just busies herself.

Ada doesn't linger unhappily in bed like he does, and especially not for reasons as miserable his: his wife won't ignore trouble afoot and just be happy.

Chrom shuffles closer to the middle of the bed, idly hoping that it'll mean she has to cuddle up if she returns.

He hears the tent flap open, deliberately heavy. For a moment, Chrom hopes it's Ada, but that would be too good to be true.

"Milord," Frederick says through the dark. 

Chrom hardly moves. He just replies: "I'm awake."

"Ada is walking away from camp," Frederick says.

Chrom does lift his head at that, and he peers at Frederick. His face is indiscernible, inscrutable. Chrom isn't sure what to expect.

"Why? Where is she going?"

"She did not tell me," Frederick says, but he says it more like: _do you really think she'd tell me?_ "She went down into the ravine."

"Wha-" Chrom stops himself and changes his question. "Did she look upset?"

"Particularly," Frederick says. "I wouldn't have come to wake you if I didn't think it was peculiar."

Chrom looks at Frederick for scarcely a heartbeat, and then he is up. No, he decides, very quickly. That is not okay. He can't lay in bed and bemoan sleep while she is upset, and there is no reason for her to be taking a walk in the ravine. 

He yanks his boots on, and he fastens Falchion at his hip with his caped baldric. The shoulder armor weighs heavy against his shoulder with only pajamas on.

"I'm going to talk to her then," he says. 

 

* * *

 

He finds her as Validar escapes. There are furious words, _panicked_ ones, and he grabs her to help her up––

She tears her wrist from Chrom's grip, and with a hard shove to his chest she pushes him down into the dirt. He looks up at her bewildered.

"Don't you get it?!" she snaps. "Don't you understand this?!"

There's venom in her voice, venom born of anguish and confusion. He stares up at her with wide eyes. She tears her wristlets from the backs of her hands, tossing them at him, and she holds up the hand with the Mark of Grima clear to him. In the dim evening light, it burns a purplish colour -- it has never burned this way before, much less been alight with a glow.

She's never known what she was missing from her past before now, and now she almost wishes for that naivety back.

"For gods' sakes, Chrom, I am everything I feared to be!" she cries, clutching her wrist as though the hand weren't a part of her.

Chrom's expression grows deadly serious, and he pushes himself up again, her wristlets in hand.

"You are not!" he declares, advancing on her. "Ada, get a grip on yourself. How could you be anything you never knew yourself to be?!"

"You aren't listening to me!" she snaps, stepping backwards. "It doesn't matter what I knew, or what I didn't know! I am not just Plegian, I am Validar's daughter, and I am-- I am somehow bound to Grima, I am everything we have fought against!"

He grabs her forearms, and when she raises her arms to try to slip from his grasp, he shakes her hard enough that she rattles like a ragdoll in his grip. 

"Get a grip on yourself!" he repeats, "You are NOT."

She looks utterly startled by this, by both the sting of his words and the intensity of his strength, but not so startled that she freezes up in his grip. She wrenches herself away, and this time, feeling devastated, he's slower to follow.

"Ada," Chrom says, concerned and frustrated and wound up, but now he's upset, too. She ignores him, walking away as she strips off her coat, and she drops it in the mud and keeps going. Chrom repeats himself: "Ada!"

Ada gets twenty paces ahead of him and then stops, doubling at the waist and emptying the contents of her stomach into the dirt.

"Oh gods," Chrom mutters, but Ada is too busy dry-heaving what's left to dignify him with a response.

He puts a hand on her back, and she shrinks down to her knees. He crouches down, too, keeping a hand running up and down her back. The ribbed knit of her shirt is damp under his fingers, soaked with sweat.

"Ada," he says, quietly. "I'm sorry."

"You're an idiot," she replies in one hard breath, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

"I know," he admits. "And I'm sorry."

An idiot she is married to and has a child with, no less, but an idiot just the same. She finally looks at him, and her misery feels compounded by the hurt look on his face. 

"I'm sorry, too," she says. "I'm sorry about a lot of things."

"It's okay," he says, and he offers her the edge of his cape. She shakes her head and gently pushes it away from her, and he drops it. "This is just... well, it's probably the worst day we've ever had, isn't it?"

"Yeah," she says.

And that's when Frederick appears, shouting –– the camp is under attack.

The night will drag on.


End file.
